Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Caen, Normandy, France
About Raoul du Bisson
- Count Raoul du Bisson (11 January 1812 – 27 February 1890) was a French aristocrat, adventurer and agent provocateur.
- He belonged to a Norman family ennobled by Louis XVIII and was a relative of Henri Conneau, a personal friend and physician of Napoleon III.In 1863, Du Bisson recruited a band of directionless Europeans in the cafés of Egypt and marched them down to Khartoum, where he pronounced it his intention to establish a colony for the production of cotton.
- Crossing into the Sudan, his party had been inspected by Egyptian customs and was found to be in possession of numerous arms and even cannon.
- This has led to the supposition that he may have been acting on the orders of Khedive Ismail Pasa, who was planning an invasion of Ethiopia.
- After inquiries with the French authorities regarding his credentials, Ismail abandoned his plans and Du Bisson was on his own.In Khartoum, Du Bisson made numerous demands on the governor-general, Musa Pasa Hamdi, who eventually declared him persona non grata.
- In early 1864 he led his band to Kassala, thence eastward to Kufit.
- There he claimed that he had the support of the French government to punish the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II for having declared the French vice-consul Guillaume Le Jean persona non grata in Ethiopia.
- The British formally protested Du Bisson's presence, but the French government denied any involvement.
- Nevertheless, the presence of a group of sixty armed Europeans on his border—and who had only gotten there with the connivance of the khedive and the governor-general—led Tewodros to suspect a French–Turkish–Egyptian alliance against him.Du Bisson also intrigued with the local Beja tribesmen and the Egyptian government eventually ordered him to leave.
- His men left via Kassala and Sawakin, but not before helping put down the mutiny of the 4th Regiment at Kassala.
- He published an account of his Sudan adventure in 1868.After the Sudan, Du Bisson returned to France.
- There are contradictory reports of his ultimate fate.
- According to some, he was killed in the fighting during the siege of Paris by the Germans in 1870.
- According to others, he got involved in the Paris Commune in 1871 and was forced into exile, where he died.
- According to yet others, he was the leader of the republican Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements and boastfully claimed to have been a Carlist in Spain, a Legitimist under the Second Empire, and a general of King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies.
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